Dateline: Viet Nam: A Military Thriller Double

by Robert Vaughan

  “Yeah? Well, believe me, if there had been a place to run to when it started, I might’ve done it,” Ernie said.

  “Ain’t it the truth?” Hunter said. “Stay awake now.” Hunter disappeared into the dark again.

  There was no problem with Ernie dozing off anymore that night. He was wide awake from that moment until the sun finally came up. He watched the sky grow lighter, the stars fade, and the shadows move away from the trees. He saw the mist settle on top of the trees for a while, then start to dissipate as the sun climbed higher. And he saw the bodies of the dead Vietnamese spread out across the field in front of them.

  “Okay,” Hunter said. “They’re sending a shit-hook for the dinks. They’re going to sling-load them out of here so we don’t have to bury them. But they want a body count.”

  All up and down the berm, the men of the platoon stood and began working out the kinks. Ernie looked over to the left. About twenty meters down the dike he saw Peterson standing over something, and he thought of Mac. Ernie walked down to Peterson. Mac was sprawled, face down, across the dike. A sticky pool of blood oozed out from under his head and his hair was matted with blood.

  “I looked at him,” Peterson said quietly. “He caught a round right in the forehead. It must’ve been right at the first; he never even changed magazines. Look, there’s no more’n five or six empty shell casings that I can see.”

  “I never heard anything,” Ernie said.

  “He died quiet,” Peterson said. “It’s better when they die quiet. But then, Mac always was a real considerate kid.”

  Ernie walked out into the field where the V.C. lay sprawled in various positions of death. The V.C. had been surprised by the strength of the ambush platoon. Expecting a patrol of only one-third the size, they mounted a major attack, hoping to score a significant victory. It backfired and nearly thirty of them lay dead.

  “Look them over good before you touch them,” Hunter cautioned. “They might have had time to

  booby-trap some of them. Bring any papers to me.

  “You got it, Sarge,” someone answered.

  The helicopter came in then, a large twin-engined, twin-rotored Chinook. It settled onto the field and half a dozen men jumped out, dragging a large cargo net with them. The V.C. bodies would be loaded onto the cargo net, then carried to their final destination in a sling load beneath the chopper.

  Ernie walked back to look at the one who had gotten so close to him. He had already been rolled over on his back. His face was ashen-gray, almost blue in color. His eyes were open wide, a little bugged out, and they were a deep, deep brown. There was no light in the eyes and though the flies hadn’t reached him yet, there was a line of ants crawling in and out of his mouth.

  There was no way of telling how old he was. He could have been anywhere from fifteen to twenty- five. Ernie had observed that Vietnamese were that way. Until the age of thirty-five, they always looked much younger. After thirty-five, they looked much older.

  The dead V.C. was wearing a T-shirt, and smiling up from the front of the T-shirt was the face of Mickey Mouse. That image stayed with Ernie for a long time... a dead V.C. in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt.

  Bill Hanlon was at the reception center in Oakland Army Air Terminal, standing in line for an airline ticket to Paducah, Kentucky. He had three stripes on his sleeves, two rows of ribbons, a Combat Infantry Badge over his left pocket, and a First Infantry Division patch on his right shoulder, indicating the unit with which he was in combat. He was a combat veteran and he was twenty years old. “Where you goin’, Sarge?” a spec-four asked.

  “Paducah, Kentucky.”

  “I got a Greyhound bus ticket to Memphis. You can have it for ten bucks, save yourself a little money.”

  “Why are you sellin’ it?”

  “My brother’s here with his car.”

  “I don’t know, riding a bus that far sure doesn’t sound like fun,” Bill said.

  “Hey, don’t sweat it, man. There ain’t nobody on the son of a bitch except other guys from ’Nam. Shit, man, it’ll be a fuckin’ party all the way.”

  “You’re next,” the man behind the counter said.

  “Wait a minute, I’m trying to decide,” Bill said.

  “You’re holding up the line, Sergeant. Now either tell me where you want to go or get out of the line.”

  Bill looked at the civilian behind the counter, and he smiled. “Why don’t I just tell you where to go?” he asked. He looked at the soldier who offered him the Greyhound ticket. “You just sold yourself a ticket,” he said.

  “The bus’ll be loadin’ at that door back there,” the soldier said, handing the ticket to Bill. “Nobody on it but G.I.s.”

  Bill took his duffel over to the pile of duffels by the door and looked outside, just as the bus rolled up. There were about thirty soldiers, marines, and airmen standing around, and they let out a cheer when the bus arrived. The bus stopped with a squeal of air brakes and the driver got out, then smiled sheepishly.

  “Okay, guys, let’s go,” he said.

  Bill found a seat about halfway back on the right, next to the window. He could feel the throb of the bus engine and the thump of the duffel bags being thrown into the luggage bay beneath him. A specialist-fourth sat in the seat next to him. The spec-four was wearing a shoulder patch from the 101st.

  “Fuck it!” the spec-four said.

  “Yeah, really,” Bill answered.

  When the bus was loaded it pulled away from the terminal. Three blocks later it stopped in front of a liquor store and everyone on the bus streamed inside and began buying liquor. Bill went in with the spec-four. Several men started getting six-packs of beer from the shelves.

  “We got it cold in the freezer,” the man behind the counter said.

  “Cold? Who the hell drinks beer cold?” someone asked.

  Bill took a six-pack over and started to pay for it.

  “From you, I gotta see an I.D.,” the clerk said.

  “I.D.?”

  “Yeah. How old are you?”

  “I’m very old,” Bill said. “I never thought I would get this old.”

  “What are you talkin’ about, I.D?” one of the other G.I.’s asked. “Are you shittin’ us? Nobody asked to see I.D. when they sent us on the line.”

  “Listen, fellas, it’s the law,” the clerk said.

  One gray-haired sergeant stepped up to the counter. He looked to be in his late forties or early fifties.

  “What about me, friend? Do you want to see my I.D?”

  “What? No, of course not. It’s just that...”

  “I’m buyin’ everything,” the sergeant said. “You tell me how much it costs, they’ll give me the money and I’ll give it to you.”

  “That doesn’t change anything,” the clerk protested.

  “Oh, yes, it does,” the sergeant insisted. “It keeps us from wasting your goddamned building.”

  “Yeah!” one of the others said.

  The clerk looked around nervously. “All right,” he said. “Buy your stuff quickly and then get out of here, will you? I don’t want the police coming around. They’ll shut me down.”

  Someone brought a girl on board at Las Vegas. At first, Bill thought one of the men had just picked her up and talked her into going with him. Then he learned that she was a whore who had talked the G.I. into taking her along. He was going to get ten percent of her action and she went to everyone on the bus asking what she could do for them and naming her price.

  Bill and the spec-four with him turned her down, but the two guys across the aisle accepted her offer and Bill could see their shadows and hear their noises as the bus rolled through the dark desert country of the great Southwest.

  As soon as Bill was home he took down everything that was on the wall of his room: the college pennants, the autographed pictures of football players, the press coverage of his own high school football days…everything. His mother and dad were divorced and his dad had remarried and was in St. Louis working at McDonne
ll. His mother worked in the traffic department of the local television station.

  Bill and his mother were eating dinner alone, though his mother had a sales conference that night.

  “Just leave the dishes,” she said. “I’ll take care of them later.” She hugged Bill again. “Oh, Bill, it is so good to have you back home again. You just don’t know how good.”

  “Mom, do you think I could just drop you off at the meeting and have the car?” Bill asked.

  “Why do you want to do that, dear?”

  “I thought I’d go out to a few of the places and bum around a bit, maybe see a few of the guys.”

  “Well…I…” His mother started to refuse. Then she saw the expression on her son’s face. “Sure, Billy, you can just drop me off and I’ll have someone bring me back home. But dear, please be careful.”

  “Yeah,” Bill said. “Yeah, I’ll be careful.”

  Bill went to the Blue Tornado, a drive-in named after the local high school football team. He saw Jim Freeman’s candy-apple Ford parked there and he smiled. It could have been eighteen months ago. Nothing had changed. He was home again.

  Simon and Garfunkel were on the juke when he went inside. The booths were crowded and the place was heavy with smoke, real tobacco, no grass.

  “Hey, Bill!” someone called. “Come here.” It was Freeman.

  “Hi, Jim. I see you’re still driving your Ford.”

  “Anybody wants that baby, they’re going to have to come up with some heavy bread. So, hey, what are you doin’ home from school? Semester break or what?”

  “School?”

  “Yeah, aren’t you going to Murray State to play basketball or something?”

  “No, not yet,” Rill said.

  “You’re not? What have you been doing?”

  “I was in the army. I just got discharged.”

  “You couldn’t have been in the army for three years already.”

  “I volunteered for the draft. That was only two years. Then I got an early-out because I went to Vietnam.”

  “You been to Vietnam?”

  “Yeah.”

  Two of the girls who were sitting in the booth with their friend Eddie looked at Bill. They were pretty girls, eighteen or nineteen, and Bill thought he would like to know them.

  “You must be some kind of jerk,” one of them said.

  “What?” Bill asked in surprise.

  “A real nerd,” the other said.

  “Why?” Bill was hurt by their remarks. “Why would you say that?”

  “You let them send you to Vietnam.”

  “That place is definitely uncool,” the other girl said.

  “I really had no choice,” Bill said.

  “Sure you had a choice. You could have gone to Canada.”

  “You’ve seen the posters, haven’t you?” one of the girls asked. She pushed her lips out, poutingly. “Girls say yes to boys who say no,” she said, sexily.

  “And no to turkeys who say yes,” the other put in coldly.

  “What was it like?” Jim asked.

  “What? You mean Vietnam?”

  “Yeah. Did you kill anyone?”

  Bill looked at Eddie and the two girls and saw in their eyes the same kind of morbid curiosity he always saw in the straphangers and clerks who would visit a battlefield after a fire fight. Walking through the dead bodies was as close as they ever got to combat.

  Why the hell should he give them any pleasure? “No, I was a librarian at the service club in Saigon,” he said. “I never got into the field.”

  The light of interest left the girls’ eyes.

  “Yeah?” one of them said. “Well, you were a real jerkoff for letting them send you over there in the first place.”

  “Listen,” Bill said as he stood up, “I gotta go. I got my mom’s car.”

  “His mom’s car,” Jim snickered.

  Bill peeled away angrily from the Blue Tornado, then went into a liquor store, where he grabbed a bottle of whiskey. The clerk was in the back of the store as Bill dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the counter, then started back for the door.

  “Just a minute, I gotta see some I.D.,” the clerk shouted, coming toward the front.

  “I don’t have time,” Bill said. “Just keep the change.”

  “I need I.D.,” the clerk shouted louder.

  “Here’s your I.D., buddy!” Bill replied giving him the finger as he went out the door.

  Bill took the bottle home with him, and he went into his room with the newly bared walls and lay on his bed and began drinking from the bottle.

  The bed was too soft, so he moved onto the floor.

  It was eleven o’clock on a Friday night. That meant noon Saturday in ’Nam.

  Last Saturday

  morning, Bill was still in the company. He and Pepper had gone into town to eat noodle soup for lunch. They got laid that afternoon. Then there was a short-timer’s party. Then Hunter took him to Ton Son Nhut. Now, here he was, lying on the floor in his room looking at walls that didn’t mean anything to him anymore.

  “Let me tell you, guys, this being-home-shit isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” Bill said, holding up the bottle in a lonesome toast in the night.

  Bill broke from the key and went up to guard the shooter. He put his hands straight up, but the shooter arched a long, high shot and the ball swished through the net. The coach blew his whistle.

  “No, no, no!” the coach said, coming over to stand by Bill and the black kid who just made the shot. Bill and the other kid were covered with a sheen of sweat and Bill wiped the back of his hand across his forehead to keep the sweat out of his eyes.

  “Hanlon, what the hell are you doing?” he asked. “You let him get that shot off.”

  “Coach, I had good position on him,” Bill said. “He just put it over me.”

  “Goddammit! Don’t you understand anything, Hanlon? You think this is some goddamned high- school or church-league game? This is college ball and in college ball you do whatever is required to stop the shot.”

  “What if I foul?”

  “Foul him. Knock him on his ass if you have to.”

  “I don’t want to see him get the shot off,” the coach said.

  “Ain’t no way that fool gonna stop me, Coach,” the black kid said. “I got all the moves.”

  “Do it again,” the coach said.

  They set up again and again the black kid got off the shot. This time when he came back down, he caught Bill in the eye with his elbow. Bill saw stars and went to one knee.

  “Get up, Hanlon,” the coach said. “Get up and get tough! I thought you were a tough Vietnam veteran. Now do it again.”

  The kid didn’t get off a third shot. When he went up this time, all elbows and shoulders, Bill threw a forearm at him, catching him in the nose, mouth, and Adam’s apple. The black kid went down, spitting teeth and choking on a smashed Adam’s apple.

  “Goddamn! What happened?” the coach shouted.

  “Is that tough enough for you, Coach?” Bill said, starting off the court.

  “Mister, I don’t like your attitude. I think you better give me about fifty laps around the court.”

  “Blow it out your ass,” Bill said without looking back.

  “You’re off the team!” the coach shouted, his voice breaking in anger. “You hear me? You’re off the team!”

  “No shit.”

  “Why do you want to go back to Vietnam?” the recruiting sergeant asked.

  “I can’t take this shit over here,” Bill said. “I can’t adjust.”

  The recruiting sergeant shook his head. “No,” he said. “You can’t say that. That’s no good. If the shrinks think you are having trouble adjusting, they’ll certify you as unfit for service in Vietnam.”

  Bill laughed. “I’m fit for service in Vietnam,” he said. “It’s the States I’m having trouble with.”

  “No good. You have to come up with another reason.”

  “What if I said I had a Vietna
mese girl pregnant and I wanted to get back to marry her?”

  “They’d probably send you to Europe.”

  “Okay, you’re the expert. You tell me how I can do it.”

  “Career,” the recruiting sergeant said.

  “Career?”

  “Sign up for six years. The promotion is faster in ’Nam. The army understands career ambition.”

  “All right,” Bill said. “Make out the papers. I say whatever I have to say. Just get me back to my old unit.”

  “You’re as good as there,” the sergeant said.

  Ernie caught a helicopter flight back to Saigon on the day after the night ambush patrol. He thanked Hunter for the ride and for the experience and promised to bring a quart of Old Granddad with him next time he came.

  When he jumped off the helicopter at Hotel Three in Ton Son Nhut, he saw Marty Burke standing near the front door of the operations office. Marty was a reporter for the Smith-Baker Syndicate. When he first met her, Ernie, like many other newsmen, thought it was a mistake to send a woman reporter into a war zone. Despite his apprehensions, Marty had proven herself a very capable journalist, and Ernie now had a grudging respect for her. More than that, he had an admiration for her. The fact that she was an exceptionally pretty woman didn’t hurt either.

  “Where’ve you been?” Marty asked, holding her hat down against the rotor blast as a helicopter took off.

  “An Loi,” Ernie said. “Where are you going?”

  “Just got back from My Tho,” Marty said. “I’m trying to get a ride downtown to the Caravelle.”

  “Mind if I look for one with you?”

  “I don’t mind at all,” Marty said. She smiled. “But if we find only one seat, I get it.”

  “You’re on.”

  “Excuse me,” a tall, thin spec-five said. He was walking by with a handful of papers. “Did you folks say you’re looking for a ride to the Caravelle?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m going to the Brinks—that’s right across the street. If you don’t mind riding in the back of a three-quarter, you’re welcome to come along.”

  “Sure. I don’t mind three-quarters. Three-quarters are nice,” Ernie said. “What about it, Marty?”